Yum, yum! Our Recipe Roundup for Spring Vegetables

Apparently this past weekend, spring ended and now it's summer so we'd better post this before too much more time elapses!

Since we've been doing a lot of harvesting this spring, we've also been doing quite a lot of eating!  We've also clearly fallen behind on ever being able to keep up with writing about it all, although there's already PLENTY of cooking blogs out there so we can only feel but so bad about it.  Still, for reference's sake, we've decided to round up some of our favorite spring recipes & photos here, made using some of the produce we've grown.

Our old shower stall holding LOTS of tomatoes in 2009!

We'll warn you, Bea's cooking habit tends to be to schedule one day per week when she'll spend 10+ hours cooking everything in the fridge, but until that time the fridge (and the spare fridge) are overflowing with random bags of produce.  Recently, Bea stumbled on this old article where she is quoted thusly: “‘We've got about five gallons of gazpacho,' says program director Bea Trickett."  Bea remembers this NFI 2009 fundraiser event fondly -- installing a window air conditioner set on the coldest setting in a small tiled bathroom to serve as a “walk-in-cooler."  The things you do in DC in August when you only have one refrigerator!  It all worked out great, and soon enough we had turned these tomatoes into 5 gallons of gazpacho.  She just hadn't had any true marketing experience yet to know that announcing the sheer quantity of food available wouldn't be the hook needed to lure most people to the event!  Live & learn.

Bea's bathroom door August 2009

Gazpacho + two tomato sauces + a canner = one fun evening

So nowadays, even when not cooking for a crowd, it always makes Bea happiest to cook as much as possible in one go, dirty every dish/pot/pan/bowl in the kitchen, use every stove burner & shelf in the oven, and then have a feast!  So because of this, she hasn't put a ton of effort into trying to stagger our harvests, preferring instead to do one massive harvest and one massive food preparation/preservation effort per crop.  It's also Chris's favorite thing to hear “We're having leftovers!" because then he knows what to expect, there's no dishwashing those days, and we get to eat dinner before 10pm!  This isn't necessarily the most practical way to cook/eat, but there it is!

With that disclaimer out of the way, now on to some of our favorite recipes!

Radishes

Radish Toast: Seriously simple, this is surprisingly delightful every time!  Working in the hot sun you start to lose salt, and while you probably can't see the large sea salt crystals in the photos, there's quite a LOT of it sprinkled on top.

 

Roasted Corn and Radish Salad with Avocado-Herb Dressing: We have very seldom followed any recipe for making a salad, but this was one of the best salads EVER!  We had to buy the corn and avocado but everything else came from the hoophouse garden.  We added chive flowers as a pretty & tasty garnish.

Radish Tart: This is one recipe that we don't follow precisely -- we add onions, garlic, and of course a lot more radishes mixed throughout the filling to make a more flavorful & hearty quiche/tart.  We also use whatever cheese we have, usually a shredded Mexican blend, and it tastes great.

Radishtop Soup: This is a tasty recipe that uses radishtops -- why throw away (or even compost) all those healthy greens?  We made quite a lot of this for our freezer (just wait to add the cream until after defrosting).  We used way more radishtops than called for in the recipe -- basically just added them until the pot was full (then they cook down).  Bea also added a good amount of smoked paprika for seasoning, and then a little more for garnish!

Radish Coleslaw: Chris got teased incessantly at work for the strong smell of this coleslaw, but put up with his coworkers' complaints because he loved finding it in his lunchbox as a healthy treat -- so tasty!  We didn't have a green cabbage so just went with purple cabbage, carrots, and radishes -- the radishes we had at the time were white icicles so they didn't add any color, but we'll definitely be making this colorful snack again!

Kale

There were a lot of spring nights that looked something like this, with Chris “massaging" avocado into a kale salad and Bea mixing up dressing into a batch of kale chips.  Our kale did really well!







Esalen Kale Salad: If potluck dinners gave out awards, we would have won several with this recipe!  This is a raw, vegan, gluten-free, and utterly delicious salad that everyone can eat.  We make a big batch of this salad about every other week, and using our own kale was way faster to prepare than store-bought because our stems were so tender we just left them in.  We usually leave out the sprouts solely because we never have them, but it's just as tasty without.

Kale Chips: We've already shared the recipe we use a few months back, we have just gotten way more adept at making them this spring!  Using dinosaur (lacinato) kale works well because it gives the chips a nice texture.

Beets

Beets are one vegetable that Chris flat-out refused to eat until he was 20 and then it became one of his favorites.  Bea had never really been exposed to beets as a child, and so never went out of her way to eat (or grow) them until Chris was clamoring for a garden full of beets!  This spring we planted 4 types, 3 of which did well, so we got to try out a few beet recipes.

Beets and Caramelized Onions with Feta: This wins both of our all-time favorite beet recipe, and it's rare we'll agree on anything so heartily!  Unfortunately this recipe is printed on a piece of paper in Bea's recipe notebook and there's no source attributed to it.  Googling hasn't brought up the exact version we have.  This recipe is almost the same, except obviously the version we have uses fresh beets boiled for 40 minutes or until tender and adds the cheese just before serving.  We'll have to write it up sometime!

Beet Greens: Again, why discard the healthy tops?  Bea seldom uses a recipe for cooking greens, just throws onions in a pan with a little olive oil, cooks for a little while, adds some garlic, Bragg's liquid aminos and cider vinegar, and throws the greens in on top to wilt (don't stir them in), then cover with a lid for a couple minutes.  If there's a lot of greens she may stir them in to cook down and add more on top.

Roasted Beet Salad with Walnuts and Goat Cheese: This recipe is from one of Bea's favorite cookbooks, Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop.  The book is alphabetized by vegetable so it's easy to find recipes matching the item you have in hand.  The goal of each recipe is to bring out the flavor of the featured vegetable, so this book works well with the “cook one crop at a time" mentality, not so much with the “my fridge is bursting with multiple vegetables and I need to cook them all at once" method.  Still, every recipe we've tried from this book has turned out delicious.  Each vegetable has a two-page summary highlighting best practices for selecting & preparing it, which will come in handy when we decide to grow something unfamiliar for some unknown reason (e.g., this year, Cardoon?) but have never prepared it before!

Beet Popsicles: Once you've boiled beets, you end up with leftover beet water that's got a lot of flavor & nutrients.  We spent a bit of time debating whether to just throw this away, but ended up making an experiment of beet popsicles!  Combine beet water equally with apple juice and pour into “popsicle molds", in our case dixie cups with plastic spoons set up on a cookie sheet.  Freeze.

Then you have a healthy cool treat for those hot days!  Warning: may turn mouth/tongue purple.

Asian Greens

Having been vegetarian for so long, Bea kind of loves Asian greens.  They've got fat juicy stems and flavorful leaves that barely need any heat before they're fully cooked.  They're a perfect match for a tofu or tempeh stir-fry, and a great excuse to use some luscious toasted sesame oil -- yum yum!

Asian Greens with Icicle Radishes & Tempeh: All right, we didn't use a recipe for this.  It was something like: (1) brown the tempeh in a little olive oil, then remove to a plate.  (2) cook up some onions in the olive oil.  (3) add radishes, garlic, and soy sauce -- cook until tender.  (4) add greens and drizzle with sesame oil, cover with a lid, and check after a minute or two -- you only want to wilt the greens very slightly.  (5) stir back in the tempeh and mix well, serve immediately.

Another Asian Stir-Fry: This was the meal we cooked for our first dinner party we've hosted at the farmhouse -- it came out pretty well!  Similar to the recipe above, except this involved marinating tofu in a mixture of soy sauce, sherry, pulverized ginger, and garlic for a couple hours and then frying it in olive oil/Braggs.  We buy tofu at Costco and freeze it, which changes the texture into something similar to a sponge -- but for marinating this works really well because it absorbs endless amounts of flavor.  You'd need to add breading if you want it crispy (usually we use a 50/50 mixture of nutritional yeast & cornmeal) but in this case we were rushing to host folks and decided soft tofu would be good enough!  We grabbed Hakurei turnips, carrots, and peas, because that's what was ready to harvest.  For greens here we probably used Mizuna.  The basic concept is to cook all the roots first until they're tender, then add greens on top to wilt.  Tofu has already been cooked separately, and then just stir it all together in a big bowl.  Serve with brown rice if desired.




Radish Curry with Mizuna: The original recipe calls for radish tops but we'd already used those up in soup, so we substituted Mizuna.  I'm pretty sure we used powdered curry/chili instead of the fresh ones called for, but used a lot of the powder for good flavor.

Swiss Chard

We've usually cooked chard like beet greens described above (the plants are cousins, after all!).  But since our chard patch is doing really well, and we hope it continues throughout the summer, we decided to try out some new recipes.  We found this one that is absolutely delicious (it involves bacon).

Savoury Swiss Chard Tart: The first time we made this, we used the crust recipe from the radish tart (mentioned above) and used cheddar instead of Gruyere (so expensive!).  The next time Bea decided to to make 3 pies at once to freeze, so she just bought the crusts!  So tasty!

Herbs

Sage fried in butter is one of the tastiest things ever!  We used to use this as a pizza topping (back when Bea ate pizza), but now we tried it as an omelette filling and it worked great!  Crispy sage, some goat cheese, and walnuts made the filling, and eggwhites made the omelette.  Complete healthy & low-carb breakfast in just a few minutes!

We have to write a separate post about salmon-sorrel lasagna.  We discovered the recipe a couple of years ago and now it's been removed from the website and no amount of googling has turned it up.  Luckily Chris cached the page!  It's very high-carb, but freezes well so you can spread eating it over a longer time period.

Strawberries

So you know how we weren't supposed to get a strawberry harvest this year because we were supposed to pinch the flowers off?  Yeah, we didn't do that.  So here's a couple strawberry things we have made:

Low-carb crepes with strawberry/spinach filling:

We just followed the recipe for the savory crepes, and flipped them with the help of a special crepe spatula a chef friend recommended.  For the filling, Bea wilted the spinach with balsamic vinegar, then tossed in sliced strawberries (should've done it the other way around so the spinach didn't overcook, but the strawberries were a last-minute inspiration!)  Top with crumbled gorgonzola and chopped walnuts.

The best vegan raw dessert ever: Chocolate Strawberry Truffle Pie!  Basically this pie is filled with cashews (both filling and crust) which is one of our favorite nuts.  It's a frozen pie so it's a perfect treat for those hot early days of summer.  And there's no processed sugar -- the sweetness all comes from the strawberries, agave, and raisins/dates!  The best part is besides chill time and soak time, it took literally only 10 minutes active prep time to make it!

Lemons

Haha, ok we didn't actually grow any lemons!  We did find a large bag of organic lemons on sale (Bea had been looking for a while).  Conventional lemons are one of the more heavily sprayed crops and usually you discard the peel but we wanted to make limoncello, meaning you use the very outside of the peels -- hence the quest for a large yet affordable quantity of organic lemons!

Limoncello: We used this recipe, but split the infused vodka in half and made half with sugar syrup and half with stevia syrup.  Even though this recipe only wanted us to wait 4 days, we waited 2 weeks for the infusion to finish, since we read on other recipes you have to wait at least a month.  Our peels hadn't lost all their color, but the flavor was really lemony.  Supposedly if you keep waiting, the bitterness disappears.  Bea's impatient though, and not a super-taster!  So 2 weeks seemed like a happy medium.

After making limoncello, you end up with about a dozen peeled lemons that need to be used up.  Bea searched google and ended up on yahoo answers where someone posted a less formatted version of a Martha Stewart recipe for Rich Lemon Ice Cream.  Luckily we have an ice cream maker (thanks, Goodwill!) and happened to have all the ingredients on hand, so we whipped up the most amazing frozen treat!  It's seriously rich; we think it's actually technically frozen custard although probably Martha Stewart knows the intricacies of naming recipes better than us.  Anyway, we highly recommend this!

To use up the rest of the peeled lemons, we wanted to make something with less sugar, so opted for low-carb lemon bars but subbing stevia for xylitol.  If you are used to the taste of stevia, these are pretty tasty, albeit very tart.  If you're expecting them to taste like regular high-sugar lemon bars, you'll be sorely disappointed.  But if you've reset your sugar threshold so that eating raisins seems like candy, these are a delicious treat indeed!










The best thing about eating seasonally is that as soon as you start to get sick of what you've been harvesting all spring, the summer squash, basil, and cucumbers are already coming in strong and giving you new flavors to experiment with!

How to Build an Herb Spiral

After Bea decided to turn the ugly dead-tree laundry pole into a focal point (a bottle tree!) for our new garden, she also wanted to put in an herb spiral at its base.  Neither of us had built one of these before, so after a lot of googling, we settled on the following procedure.  All told, it took about 8 hours to build, albeit that was with only one person working, and with some breaks factored in as part of that time estimate.  It's probably a half-day project with a couple of people just gettin'-it-done.

Step 1: Find some old bricks or stones (or new ones if you prefer)

Bea found a huge pile of weathered old bricks under the overhang on the back of the outbuilding we call the chicken coop (no, we don't have chickens...yet).  She had been trying to come up with a project to use them up so we could walk through without clambering over the brick pile; this find helped inspire the herb spiral idea in the first place.

Step 2: Set up your circle

Once you have a good supply of bricks, install a stake temporarily into the spot you want to be the center of your herb spiral.  In our case, we didn't need a stake, we just worked from the dead tree/bottle tree.  Get a string or tape measure and use it to mark out a perfect circle.  Remove any weeds/vegetation growing in this area (Bea dug it up lightly to loosen the soil).  If you were doing this in the fall, you could put down cardboard or layers of wet newspaper to avoid the weed removal, but in spring when they're growing rapidly, it's best to just put in the effort to remove them.  Our circle has a 3' radius.

Step 3: Lay out your spiral

Use your bricks/stones to mark out a spiral.  Keep in mind that depending on what you plan to plant, a lot of herbs like to spread out so they'll need plenty of space.  We only built a two-layer spiral with each layer being 18" wide.

Step 4: 

Fill in your spiral with a layer of compost.  You can put compost in between the bricks too to help hold everything together.

Step 5: Cover with straw

Make sure you get straw, not hay -- hay is for animals to eat and thus contains nutritious seed-heads (which will sprout in your garden).  Straw is just dry stalks without seeds, and much more suitable for use in mulching a garden!

The straw will break down slowly and continue providing nutrients to your growing plants over time.

Step 6: Build up a second layer of bricks

Place a second layer of bricks over top of the first around the spiral.  You'll want your spiral to end up sort of like a pyramid/cone, with the center being tallest -- so taper off on stacking the bricks as you get towards the bottom.  Don't forget to stagger your bricks as you stack them, like in a brick wall!  So each brick you place on the spiral should overlap two bricks below.  If you're working with brick pieces instead of whole bricks, just do your best to overlap joints so they don't fall over and collapse.

Step 7: Fill in with compost, repeat as many times as needed

You'll repeat the brick/compost/straw layers until you either run out of materials or until your spiral reaches its desired height.  Ours is 4 layers of bricks at the top and 1 at the bottom, or about a foot and a half tall in the center.

Step 8: Get ready to plant!

Part of the beauty of an herb spiral is that it gives you multiple “planting zones" suitable to growing a variety of herb plants.  The soil at the top of the spiral will dry out quickest, while the bottom of the spiral will remain moister.  In the northern hemisphere, your southern part of the spiral will get direct sun most of the day while the raised nature of the spiral will provide some shade for the northern side.  The taller and larger your spiral is, the more customized you can make each position for your plants (just don't forget you'll need to be able to reach into the middle to harvest!).

So now you've got some choices to make -- note that some herbs do well in multiple positions:

Sunny Dry Positions (at/near the top of your herb spiral) – aloe vera; bay tree; garlic chives; lavender; marjoram; oregano; rosemary; sage; tarragon; thyme

Shady Dry Positions (on the northern side, in the shadow of your spiral and/or taller plants) – basil; nasturtium; oregano; parsley; sage; tarragon; thyme; yarrow

Sunny Moist Positions (middle/southern side of herb spiral) – arugula; bergamot; chives; cilantro/coriander; nasturtium; parsley; sorrel; spring onions; strawberries

Shady Moist Positions (middle/northern side of herb spiral) – arugula; borage; chamomile; chives; parsley; sorrel; strawberries; violets

Sunny Wet Positions (bottom of herb spiral on the southern side) – chamomile; mints

Shady Wet Positions (bottom of herb spiral on the northern side) – ginger (harvest before frost); lemon balm; mints; watercress (often installed in a shallow pool at the very bottom of herb spirals)

Chris came out to help right in time for the fun part!

You'll have best success if you plant transplants (as opposed to direct seeding) in your herb spiral, so start by placing all your plants in pots around the spiral.  This way you can move them around to space them evenly and move as many times as you need until they're exactly where you want them.  Once you're ready, just go ahead and pop them into the ground.

Since the spiral is constructed of straw and compost (both of which drain very easily), you'll need to water deeply and daily until your new plants are well-established!

East side

South side

West side

North side

Our completed bottle tree/herb spiral garden centerpiece!